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This is a writer who uses her whole body. 
This artistic maturity is beautiful and rare.  

— Poet Jenny Factor
Remember Rwanda... is powerful and necessary. Chaiken is plumbing both personal and cultural trauma, and using story 
to heal both. It’s stunning. It took my breath away.

— Novelist and Memoirist Gayle Brandeis

Remember Rwanda: a rainbow of colored glass, like teeth

Picture


Click on the photo for a link to KIGALI HOTEL, excerpted
from a forthcoming book-length memoir about the time
I spent in Rwanda, where I served as international creative director for the 20th commemoration of the 1994 genocide. 

and a handful of poems


I’m not Sioux
​

Socorro, who is Sioux, says
she walks Skid Row streets
lined with tents, shopping carts
with all their stuff.
“There but for the grace …,”
Socorro says.


She was a drinker, a user,
thrower-away of self.
Her people got thrown away.


We sit outside Mi Tierra Mexican coffee
Five bucks a cup, celebrating.
Her sister's on chemo,
had a good enough day
for Socorro to slip away.


The sweet steam, bitter sip takes me back to
when I walked like her, but East Village streets,
only enough bread for a hot drink.
I warmed myself in
Saint Marks bookstore stacks
because the furnace
in my basement storefront
was perpetually busted.


Runaway from suburban roots,
I pulled my stuff from perch to perch
in a metal trunk on wheels
with a green vinyl leash
through slushy streets.


Not Sioux, but Jew.
Not Survivor or even child of.
But flowing through
the stream of my blood,
my family, my familiars,
are slippery-slidy escapers of
Eastern Europe,
the Lower East Side.
Ancestors who have no face
with shame that has no name,
no story.

Stalking me that winter on slushy streets,
a gaunt crone, long-legged like a crane,
grey wrapped, picked through trash,
curled up at night in the next-door stoop.
People pointed. There were whispers:
"She's the one who shot Andy Warhol."


[That’s all I knew then, pre-Internet,
pre-movie with Lili Taylor.]

She was out of jail, living on the street.
On my street. Winter. Sandals.
Ankles swelled up like crusty trunks of trees,
toenails black as the filth behind her ears.

Angular. Black hair frosted with kinks of grey
piled high upon her head. Classy,
regal blooded, like me.

Google now gives her a name,
a Wiki-thread of story: Valerie Solanas.
Andy wouldn’t produce
her play “Up Your Ass.”
So she set out to kill him.
As would anyone off their rocker
for whatever reason.
I sure would.


More than twice my age at the time,
she was the age of my mother,
my much-older sister,
my future me.

Sprung from her cage,
night after night that winter
that went on, for fucking ever,
me and the woman I know now
as Valerie Solana
shared Saint Marks stacks.
It was warm there.
It was open late.

Keeping distance to avoid
the stench of her, I was rapt by her,
felt the creepy crawl of my legs blowing up,
becoming her legs, maggots between my toes.

Her fine profile etched still in my brain,
she’s long gone, [her obit in the Times]
and yet, “There but for the grace …”
I thought, I think, at a time when,
no, my dear Socorro,
there was, there is
so little grace.


There’s the Mother and the Mother
of the Mother
and the Child of the Mother
who is no Mother
will not be a Mother
will not pass on 
the Curse.


If only, the Child thought as a child,
if only I were Nicaraguan, 
if only we’d lived through
​    the Holocaust.
​

It would all make sense.
Picture

​Whirring

I linked arms in dark places with
those who have seen the arms of those they love
    hacked off
    hearts cut out
        eaten


I seem intact
    wake up
    walk the yellow dog
    swab the bathroom sink
    say good morning to the bus driver
    and mean it


Day’s end
I lay myself down grateful
for warmth in winter
    belly as full as I want it to be
    teeth clean
    face creamed
    comfort of that close-by aging hound
    a loyal loving man


Despite the little blue pill
despite the hypnotic lull playing
through the buds in my ears
    promising wholeness
    power
    and restorative rest
​

This whirring I do late in the night


on the web: a series on slowing down
Picture
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  • ABOUT
    • ARTIST TALK
  • Terrain Vague
  • THE DIG
    • THE PLAY >
      • SYNOPSIS
      • WORKSHOP HISTORY
      • THANKS
    • THE TEAM
    • PRESS
    • VIDEO
    • Photos
  • LOOKING FOR LOUIE
    • THE PLAY
    • press
    • video and slideshow
    • production history
  • OTHER WORK
    • what she left
    • KWIBUKA20
    • WRITING FOR THE PAGE
  • what's the story? studio
  • patreon
  • CONTACT
  • NEW YEARS DAY